​Word and Excel templates in Dynamics CRM allow you to design the layout of a document, like an Account Summary, using the familiar Microsoft Office applications and then replace the data in them with data from Dynamics CRM. This is incredibly useful for creating documents where the look-and-feel is important, but would otherwise have to be repetitively created for, say, every Account.​

However, if you review the steps to create one of these templates, you’ll notice that you have to download a template from CRM after selecting the data you want to include. The template now has the XML Mapping elements you need, but is completely blank. In a lot of cases, that’s fine, but formatting, especially in Word, can be a pain-staking process and it doesn’t always copy-and-paste correctly from your old document into a brand-new one.​

So, if adding your formatting to a new blank document is going to be a real hassle, what do you do? Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to add the mapping data to your existing Word file.​

1. Go through the normal steps in CRM to select your data and download the template.2. Instead of opening the template in Word, change the extension from .docx to .zip.3. Unzip the file and the folder structure will look something like this:

4. Open the XML Mapping panel in your existing Word document and from the Custom XML Part drop-down, choose (Add new part…)

5. Navigate inside the customXML folder from above and choose item.xml.6. Click the drop-down again and you should see the CRM entity XML (in this case, from an opportunity):

​​At this point, you’re ready to start using your CRM fields in your pre-existing file! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.